


and hell followed.

by openended



Category: Sanctuary (TV), Slender Man Mythos
Genre: Gen, Horror, Mind Games, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-24
Updated: 2012-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:52:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helen spends her lifetime wondering if the shadow wasn't there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and hell followed.

They’re playing hide-and-seek and it’s her turn to hide. She’s far enough away that she can no longer hear him, but she knows how he counts and she has another ten to go before _ready or not here I come_.

She stops suddenly in the front hall. There’s an almost-man standing in the corner by the abandoned coat rack. It’s the tail end of summer and she supposes that they’ll start using it again soon.

Light slides off of him as he melts into the dark corner. Only he doesn’t quite melt, he’s blacker than the deepest evening shadows. His pristine white collar floats in the darkness.

Though she tries, she cannot see his face.

She swallows and changes direction, game abandoned. She finds her mother in her office and tells her of the tall thin man in a suit who has no face.

When they return to the hall together, he isn’t there.

Henry runs into the room and calls _found you_.

Her mother’s grip on her hand tightens.

* * *

She runs her fingers over the mark in the tree: a circle with an _x_ through it. The symbol was carved long ago. She wonders if it’s always been there. The edges are smooth and the white flesh of the tree is stained dark with something her mind will not let her believe.

She senses him behind her. She knows she should have left him alone and not dug too deeply, but it is not her nature to leave things she does not understand alone. She is not so delusional that she thinks she can help him; for four years, she’s stayed up late with her drawings in libraries across the world, searching for a name, a species, something concrete to know and comprehend. She found none.

Only legend and myth. And horror.

**what do you want.**

Helen turns, slowly, half-convinced that he will not be there when she faces him. “Who are you?”

Old scars begin to bleed.

* * *

Will scoffs at the term _psychic energy_ , but schools his face into something more serious when he realizes he was the only one in the room who laughed. Henry looks like he’s five seconds away from needing a new pair of pants, Kate looks like she’s remembering something she read on the internet, and Magnus…Magnus looks genuinely terrified.

He sits down in a chair and asks her to start from the beginning. Weird and scary is part of his job description now and he’s faced vampires, werewolves, and Jack the Ripper in the past few years but not a single one of them has reduced his boss to this level of primal fear.

Henry leaves the room, paler than usual. Will senses that this is not something to mock him about over a few beers when it’s finished.

* * *

Though school is about to start, Helen sends both Henry and Ashley to London for a month. She will not allow him around her family, at least until she knows what he wants.

“We’ve discussed this,” she says.

**sorry.**

She tries to use the moment to her advantage; he’s sitting under direct light, after all, but no matter how hard she stares, his face eludes her. She remembers a frantic, frightened morning over eighty years ago and drawings in a journal whose pages were burned not long after. She stops staring.

She makes him a deal, instead. She’s sacrificing the sleep and pleasant dreams of countless children, but it’s better than sacrificing a few of their lives. She tells him _fear only_ and forbids him from abducting and killing.

When he shakes her hand, it’s a physical struggle to not shiver and scream.

She feels icy hot fingers creep up her arm and, for a singular horrifying moment, she cannot move.

Then she blinks and the universe shifts and she is alone.

The fire crackles and the only indication that anything occurred is a tear clinging to her eyelashes.

* * *

There’s a sense of dread beginning to build in the base of her spine as Helen clicks on the email from Henry. The subject line states, simply, _him_.

The email contains links to articles about missing children, and a YouTube channel created by three bored college kids. Helen reads everything with an analytical eye and then turns to the video.

The dread seeps through her bones to settle in her stomach.

She meets with Henry about other things and notices how carefully he doesn’t mention anything about the email; not its contents, not the travel arrangements she may need to make, not any technology to bring with her.

The belief that speaking of him will cause him to appear is one they’ve disproven countless times. But she doesn’t begrudge Henry his terror.

* * *

Her head spins, a nanosecond behind the earth’s rotation. 

She runs bruised fingertips over the scratches on her arms. Only then does she realize that she has no recollection of the night before. A tiny seed of fear, quietly present since she awoke, begins to grow. Despite her dizziness, she stands, rushing to the dresser to search for her field journal. She loses her balance and catches herself on the washbasin stand. Her fingers brush against a ball of cool, wet cloth. The white fabric is stained dark brown with blood and so is the water.

She begins to worry about her previous evening.

She finds the journal at the top of her bag and sits back on the bed to read. The last page is filled with drawings.

A thin man. Tall. Impossibly tall, and she knows this despite having given herself no sense of scale on the sketches. He’s wearing a suit.

He has no face.

And she knows, deep inside of her, that he has no face not because she never saw his face or because her mind blocked it out. He has no face because he has no face.

She almost begins to remember.

And then, in handwriting that is not hers: **let me be.**

* * *

Helen sprints through the corn field, dried husks slapping at her face in the brisk air. Her breath hangs in puffs behind her in the moonlight as she runs. Adrenaline surges through her veins when her foot catches a rut, left behind in mud to be hardened into a frozen crater. She keeps her balance, barely, and continues running to where she thinks she left the car. Her lungs burn with exertion and cold, but she knows that if she stops to cough she’ll be caught.

She stops short at the end of the row, momentum nearly toppling her over. Her hand immediately goes to the gun at her hip though it won’t do a damn bit of good against the tall, thin shadow in front of her.

**found you.**

She jerks awake with a sharp intake of breath. Cold, impossibly cold, and she digs further underneath her blankets, searching for warmth and salvation.

She finds none and when there’s a knock on the door, announcing tea and breakfast, she’s already been up for hours.

* * *

When they return from London, giddy and excited and speaking in atrocious accents mimicking their Uncle James and all of his friends, there is a new rule.

It is not their first rule, but it is the first rule they do not understand.

_Write down your nightmares._

They never play hide-and-seek again.

* * *

“What do you want?” Helen asks of the shadow.

He smiles.


End file.
